NOW FOR A CITIZEN SCIENCE MOBILE APP

The
Maine-based (US) MDI Biological Laboratory has developed a new, easily
accessible mobile phone app to help community organisations track and analyse crowd-sourced
data from citizen volunteers on crucial environmental questions. The free app
is an offshoot of Anecdata.org, an online citizen science portal that collects and
shares environmental data. The portal is now being used globally by
organisations such as the South Carolina Aquarium and Mass Audubon to
crowd-source data to help identify, locate, and find solutions to environmental
threats in the region of Mount Desert Island, Maine. Anecdata.org now hosts 60
projects, such as projects to track the disappearance of eelgrass from Maine’s
coastal waters; track “king,” or exceptionally high, tides in the Gulf of
Maine; and a survey of the decline of the eastern meadowlark in North America.
The new app will make it easy for participants to receive notifications from
projects and share observations from the field.